Today, Tomorrow... Forever...

Weight loss is an exhausting, full time job. But can it really be anything else when I’ve spent twenty-one years accumulating bad habits?

It’s not even that I’m physically exhausting myself, though spinning certainly was. (No, I haven’t gone back yet. It’s on the to-do list. I’m considering using stationary bikes more often, so I can get some calluses on my butt cheeks, and thus endure less pain.) Doing simple addition isn’t that challenging either. “If I had an egg, which is 70 calories, and a glass of 1% milk, which is 110 calories, and a piece of toast…” I can do that. Especially since I use www.sparkpeople.com which has a really nifty calorie counter for me. Even the overly loving community members (“I ate 7,000 calories today! Bad me!” “No, you aren’t bad. I’m sure you’ll be within your 1,200-1,500 range tomorrow…”) themselves are what get to me.

I get to me.

No pun intended, but… The good ol’ US of A treats obesity like it’s an elephant in the room. And people who are obese do, too. What really gets me is all of these excuses we make up for ourselves. “It’s genetic.” “I’m big boned.” Please take a moment, and be honest. If to nobody else, than to yourself.

It’s you.

It’s… me.

And that’s the discouraging part. I already know most of the tricks. I haven’t figured out exactly how fat leaves the body, but it’s on my to-do list. The nutrition professor at school will get a visit from me soon.

But I mean, if I already know how to lose weight—10 minutes of exercise a day, eat between 1950-2300 calories—why am I not skinny already? To think that I have to be successful at exercising AND eating correctly most days for the rest of my life is terribly overwhelming. Looking up every single thing I eat is annoying—especially on days I mess up. But it’s not like failing to enter my food into my log is going to make me un-eat it. So when I look back at my log and see that I’ve eaten over 2300 calories by significant amount four out of the past six days, it’s just like… “Dammit. Am I ever going to get this right?”

I am a person who believes in behaviorism. So I know that behavior change is gradual. I know that with the proper set up, it will stick. And I have to believe that it will. Because the only thing that would be worse than weighing over three hundred pounds my entire adult life would be weighing over three hundred pounds for all of my adult life except for two. Two years of being fit would be worse.

I need to just plug away, and focus on today. And tomorrow. And not any further out than that. Because it’s the further out that gets me every time and makes each day a great day to not count calories or exercise.

So. I will forget about next week, and next month, and next year. I will focus on today. What can I do in the next twenty four hours to make my life a little better?